Nada BayaminPracticum 461

Difficulties in Translating ‘A rose for Emily’

Translation is not an easy task. When I decided to translate a short story,’ A rose for

Emily’ by William Faulkner, from English to Arabic I knew it wasn’t going to be a word-for-

word translation. I have to translate ideas, emotions, views, opinions, images and culture. Since

translating from one language to another of a different origin, there is more to the translation

than just translating vocabularies .And this is applied to English-Arabic translation. While the

English language is Germanic, the Arabic language is Semitic. Therefore, the morphological and

syntactic structure is totally different. However, when the translating started, problems started to

occur. There was getting to know the background of the story, the structure of the sentence

(syntax), the structure of the word (morphology), lexicons. Not to forget to be faithful to the

author’s writing.

One of the difficulties I had was not having a good background of The American Civil

War. I had to read about the Confederate and the Union and also the Southerners and

Northerners.

Then there was the grammatical structure of the English language .The grammatical of a

sentence in English is SUBJECT + VERB + OBJECT while in Arabic it is VERB + SUBJECT

+ OBJECT. For example, in English these sentences:

Miss Emily Grierson died is translated to Arabic to جريرسون إميلي اآلنسة توفيت The druggist looked down at her is translated to إليها الصيدلي نظر

Therefore, the verbs توفيت and نظر precedes the subjects جريرسون إميلي الصيدلي and اآلنسة

in the Arabic language respectively. While in English they follow the subjects.

Also, the switching of positions is not limited to the VERB/SUBJECT position of a sentence. In

English the ADJECTIVE precedes the NOUN while in Arabic it is the opposite. For example:

a small fat woman is translated to بدينه و صغيره امرأة

a big dark ready man is translated to رشيق و ضخم رجلIn both translated sentences the nouns امرأة and رجل are preceding the adjectives.

The most difficult part was translating the sentences within the sentences like:

Colonel Sartoris, the mayor--he who fathered the edict that no Negro woman should appear on

the streets without an apron-remitted her taxes, the dispensation dating from the death of her

father on into perpetuity.

The sentence: he who fathered the edict that no Negro woman should appear on the streets

without an apron is just adding information about Colonel Satoris, so it had to be part of the

Arabic sentence by adding it as a description or an adjective like this:

أن الكولونيل سارتوريز محافظ البلدة المنشئ لقرار يمنع بظهور أي امرأة زنجية في الشارع دون

.مئزرها, كان أيضا يلغي ضرائب اآلنسة إميلي

The morphological change was not as difficult as it was complex. An Arabic verb could

provide the tense, the gender or the number of the subject and object like this word: قهرتهم. It

provides the tense which is past the gender of the subject which is female and single while the

number of the object is plural. The original sentence is SHE vanquished them.

With all these difficulties, the most was the vocabularies. I thought having two electronic

dictionaries with Oxford English-English dictionary, Al Munjed Arabic-Arabic dictionaries and

Al Mawrid English-Arabic dictionary would help me. However, there are words that –as far as I

found out - have no equivalent in Arabic like Fleshless and cuckolded. Also the words that

describe the house; I had to ask an architecture about spires and cupolas, pick, riggers and mules

to get an idea about them. Nevertheless, what was surprisingly helpful is Babylon. It is a

translating website that provided me with accurate and clear translation of these words: acrid pall

-which was only explain in Al Mawrid with no equivalent - bays, buggy, cotton gins, ebony,

livery, noblesse oblige, silhouette, spraddled, stable, Yankee and other words.

What I found also helpful is searching for the word in Google Image Search. It gives a

clear picture. However what I found helps the most is the knowledge. When you already know

about something you can explain it but when you don’t; reading is a necessity. Most of all what I

learned by experience is that translation is a science.